Yuletide shows have a message, do we listen?

Deep in the heart of the "Donny and Marie: Christmas in Chicago" show now at the Oriental Theatre, Donny Osmond rolls out a new song. It is called "If Everyday Could Be Christmas" and the title tells you all you need to know. In a nutshell, it's a lament that we don't behave like it's December when it's January.

This is not, of course, an original idea. Back in 1973, the British glam-rock band Wizzard (founded by Roy Wood of Electric Light Orchestra fame) released "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday," which has been a staple of holiday parties ever since. Wood and his pals were less altruistic (and less lyrically coherent, with their stuff-and-nonsense about rosy cheeks "lighting the way"). They mostly wanted life to be one long Christmas party. It was 1973, after all.

Still, I've been hearing the "Why isn't it always like Christmas?" complaint almost every night over these last couple of weeks, when a conscientious theater critic finds himself facing down a veritable plethora of Scrooges, schooners, Nativities, nutcrackers (balletic and otherwise), "It's a Wonderful Lifes," and various contemporary Christmas stories, miracles and so on. Surely, such an excessive diet of seasonal good will — most people do one or two of these shows a year — should provoke something overarching to say. Or, at least, ruminate upon.

To a large extent, Donny is only channeling Scooge's long-suffering nephew Fred, who currently remarks nightly at the Goodman Theatre (right across Dearborn Street) that Christmas is "a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-travelers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Ah yes, fellow-travelers to the grave. Indisputably true, of course. Yet remarkably difficult to keep in your mind. And when you look around, it certainly seems that many of the journeys you see are not the same as your own. Charles Dickens, though, was wise to remind us of the common destination; that line of Fred's gets me every year.

I've long been intrigued by how many Christmas shows—and their repetition is a huge part of their appeal — rely on the assumption that people can and will change, when life suggests that mostly, they don't. Down at "The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey," an appealing new entry in our Christmas lineup, a pained woodcutter who has lost his boy has a total transformation after he takes a moment to ponder that the God (the one he believes in) also lost a son. It's just a matter of having a throught—he is on stage by himself, when the Christmas bell goes off. And then — pow! — he is a different man. How wonderful.

But the optimism of these shows is not just limited to the power of the individual. In "It's a Wonderful Life" (you can currently choose from two different theatrical versions in Chicago), George Bailey would still be in trouble, even after Clarence has made him see that he has much for which to be thankful, were it not for his mortgagees heading to his house and giving him back some money. At Christmas, communities invariably do the right thing.

Some Christmas shows allow people to carry on making a few bucks — even Dickens does not turn Scrooge, who keeps his office open with a better paid clerk, into a social worker and, over at "The Christmas Schooner" at the Mercury Theater, the hard-water sailors who bring the Christmas trees to immigrant Chicagoans are still allowed to sell the trees. But self-interest is usually glossed over in our Capra-esque world of Christmas entertainment, where people make the minimum profit to stay in business and deficit hawks never get elected.

I sometimes amuse myself this time of year by wondering about the sequel to all these stories. Can Scrooge really sustain a payday loan business for the Victorian unbanked? Does he lend money for free? Retire? Hand it all to the Cratchits? How do the Christmas sailors feel when they start sending trees by railroad? Probably how their descendants felt when Home Depot got into the tree business. How do George Bailey and those homeowners work out their new web of indebtedness? Surely, the federal regulators would pass new rules.

I also often exit from one of these shows newly determined to do some charitable, selfless act. And then I don't really know what to do.

My most common thought, thought, is my ongoing fascination with how little of the sentiment of these ever-popular shows actually makes it into public discourse. You don't hear much talk of goodness, kindness or forgiveness in the political realm. At any time of year.

So, Donny, my fellow traveler, I understand your wish. But I also suspect it's probably just as well that every day is not Christmas, because we would not be able to agree on how it should change our lives.